Well, after too much research and three browsing sessions instore, this was my list in order of preference ready for Black Friday 'deals'.
1) Dell XPS, 13.3", £1200, 13.3", i5 8250U, ports galore including thunderbolt, 11hr battery and the smallest. Not likely to be discounted by anything that will put it close to the other options.
2) HP Envy, 13.3", £850, i5 8250U, no thunderbolt but does have a USB-C and a Displayport (confusingly this is exactly the same as USB-C but with a different logo and function) 14hr battery life, and low end dedicated Nvidia graphics. Speakers appear much better than the Ideapad and Yoga. Only a few mm's bigger than the XPS.
3) Lenovo Ideapad 530S, £850, 14", i7-8550U, good range of ports but suspect it cannot do dual external monitors as its only display output appears to be HDMI. Poor 8hr battery life.
4) Lenovo Yoga 720, £800, 13.3", i5 8250U, decent range of ports including displayport and thunderbolt but no SD slot, 10hr battery, smaller 128gb SSD drive than the rest, rubbish speakers.
I have swayed towards all four of these laptops but settled on the HP Envy, then I noticed HP had the Envy on their own website for 'black friday week' at £699, (£686 with a discount from my employers 'perks' website). Made a note of it but then noticed the stock was going down daily and decided to go in today and get PC World to price match it before it went out of stock. Whilst waiting I noticed the model number was different but couldn't see any difference in spec so crossed my fingers they wouldn't notice. However, we didn't even get that far, apparently PC World only price match with certain retailers which is a pretty poor show! They would not offer any movement on the price.
Walked out, phoned the insurance company and they agreed to cancel the gift voucher and give me cash instead, knocking 9% (£70) off the value due to discounts they get with suppliers. Did a quick bit of maths based on the current prices, rather than topping up £100 instore, I top up £8 at HP and order direct. So I placed my order earier, and just now decided to try and find the difference in models. Turns out its a newer processor, faster with a slightly smaller cache, but overall is a better performer than the one in PC World. Not that I will ever notice...
(i5-8265U v i5-8250U if anyone is interested)
arrghhh I've tried to fix that formatting four times now, and I'm on my crunchy old chromebook so limited methods to reformat the text in notepad or something!
(i5-8265U v i5-8250U if anyone is interested)
OOhh ... faster CPU. 😀
My Acer is still good and I think I have found my Skype login etc so will try Cortana ... colleague (IT bloke) told me Cortana was a waste of space ... 😀
Don't know about Cortana, but whilst I was waiting for the sales person who could not price match, I noticed Microsoft claiming how much faster/battery efficient their Edge browser is, compared to firefox and chrome. I think it said 98% longer battery life when watching streaming video compared to firefox and/or chrome which is a pretty big claim, anyone switched to Edge and have any thoughts?
... anyone switched to Edge and have any thoughts?
Yes, Edge is fast but I am used to Firefox so will stick to that for a while but will keep a note on battery life saving if I am travelling as Firefox can be very hungry.
Amazon have Microsoft surface pro 6 with keyboard for £749. Don’t know if that’s any help tho.
Asus UX331UN £749 at John Lewis - 8th gen i5 / 8 GB / 256 GB SSD / NVidia graphics / USB-C / light and skinny as in an aluminium case / fingerprint reader / pen compatible 13 inch HD screen apparently
14 inch i3 / 4GB / 256 GB SSD / on board graphics for £529 / £549.
We've had a HP Envy 17" laptop for a few years. Big machine, but is gaming capble as it has an i7 and a GTX video card.
Upgraded with to 16GB Ram (from 12) and whacked in a 1TB SSD (has 2 drive bays so the HD went in as number 2)
Seriously quick even now it's about 4 years old. Doesn't play games quite as fast as my son's Gaming machine, but the GFX card is older. We also have a HP Pavilion 15" - standard bit of kit, but we upgraded with SSD and to 8GB. Quick.
We also got a second hand HP Spectre XT, really small, thin and light, but you can't upgrade the RAM as it's just 4GB. That said, it's an ideal college laptop - again SSD drive as standard.
